My Reading List
2021
Death's End
By Cixin Liu
Absolutely great. A perfect ending to the Three Body Problem trilogy.
The Dark Forest
By Cixin Liu
The battle at the end was just awful. The whole lead up to intercepting the probe was just so irrational. Anyone with any rational sense wouldn't form a tight rectangular formation when confronting the probe of an enemy coming to commit genocide of your race.
The fact that it took something like 3 minutes to break formation after getting slaughtered by the probe is ridiculous as well. After seeing a whole row of 100 ships destroyed, the first instinct would be to at least spread out.
Otherwise though the book was good, and in a way even the terrible battle was good because it got me emotionally invested, like watching a horror film and going crazy over the characters' bad decisions.
The Three Body Problem
By Cixin Liu
The first hundred or so pages were boring to me, though the rest of the book was great. I loved the ending.
Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcom Gladwell
A good, but not great, book.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
By Yuval Noah Harari
Alright.
Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society
By Christopher Robert Hallpike
An interesting look into primitive societies.
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
By Neil deGrasse Tyson
The title is accurate.
The Midnight Library
By Matt Haig
A middle of the road fiction book about living your life in the now. Somewhat interesting, but not great.
Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States
By Alan Greenspan
An interesting overview of the economics of mostly 1800-1900's america.
Children of Time
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
An excellent idea for a book. I loved it, though it surely should've been shortened.
2020
Map and Territory
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Overall I was unimpressed and found no value from Yudkowsky's writing.
Essays by the LessWrong Community
by an assortment of authors
Again, I was unimpressed by almost all of the essays written in this collection of the best LessWrong essays compiled into book form.
My only real connection to the rationalist community is through, first reading Gwern who I love, and then discovering the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit through Eric Weinstein which I discovered was full of very interesting discussions. Later on I discovered LessWrong is where this rationalist community was created, including Gwern and Scott Alexander, the author of Slate Star Codex which the subreddit formed around.
I love the rationalist community, but hate the essays outside of Gwern and Scott Alexander.
Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942
by Ian Toll
The first of a trilogy about the pacific theatre.
Perhaps the most interesting history book I've read. I've read reviews which claim Toll writes fiction-like non-fiction, in the sense that there's a narrative story which keeps you hooked. I found this to be completely true, at least when it came to the more grand broad strategy chapters of the book. The more tactics focused specific battle retellings just wasn't something which interests me. I don't really care that an aircraft carrier was receiving landings at 10:20, re-arming the landed planes at 10:50, and launching again at 11:30 to give a made up example.
The strategy was 5/5, tactics 3/5 for me, at least when it comes to personal interest, not quality-wise, in that case it would be 5/5.
2019
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
by Jordan Peterson
Ones view of this book is a litmus test for the ability to behave non-biased at the most base level. There is absolutely nothing even coming close to controversial within this book, unlike what many within the corporate media spoke of. While yes, it is true that there's little profound advice, I find this criticism unfounded as that seems emblematic of the self-help genre as a whole.
As for the purpose of the book, none of the 12 rules resulted in any actionable change for myself. However, I still would recommend this book to those in dark places looking to crawl out. Overall, I found Peterson's writing style pleasant and don't regret my time spent reading this very normal book.
Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden
I'm a huge Snowden fan, and reading this book was an absolutely joyful experience. If my memory is correct, the first half of the book focused on his personal life with the latter half being more about the leaks themselves.
I really connected with Snowden's personal life story. It was exciting to read about someone I felt somewhat connected with as we both dropped out of high school, are interested in technology, have family military experience, and are fairly patriotic.
I was far less interested in the information surrounding the leaks themselves, as I was already very well informed, but I was still engaged the whole time.
Reading Permanent Record was very inspiring.
No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War
by Hiroo Onoda
The story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer who fought a guerilla war in the Philippines which lasted 30 years after Japan's surrender.
It was very fascinating reading about this man's story. I liked reading about his earlier military experience while stationed in Manchuria, dancing the nights away in dance halls. Later on, during his infamous experience in the Philippines, reading about his small squad slowly dying off or "abandoning" to the post-war Filipinos was very interesting. The point where his brother came to the island, with many others, to persuade him to surrender with no success was sad and confusing. His receiving a postcard from his wife and children and yet believing the postcard was propaganda due to their house in the background being different, not aware of Japan being completely destroyed in the firebombing raids, was sobering.